October 19, 2017

Robots, get yer robots!

A 45 year old married father of two with a mortgage and a pair of college educations to fund. The remote yet persistent threat of a nuclear war is not what keeps him up at night. In fact, he might almost see it as a relief should it come. He is a bundle of raw nerves, and each day brings even more dread and foreboding than the day before. What’s frying his nerves and impinging on his amygdala all day long is something far scarier, after all. He, like everyone else, is afraid that he doesn’t have a future.

He is petrified by the idea that the skills he’s managed to build throughout the course of his life are already obsolete.

The article riffs on Vonnegut's novel Player Piano, though the idea of coming thermo-nuclear war as a relief has a Walker Percy ring to it, though Percy made do with hurricanes.

There are 20 possible components of Harmony’s personality, and owners will use an app to pick a combination of five or six that they can adjust to create the basis for the AI. You could have a Harmony that is kind, innocent, shy, insecure and helpful to different extents, or one that is intellectual, talkative, funny, jealous and happy. McMullen had turned the intellectual aspect of Harmony’s personality up to maximum for my benefit – a previous visit by a CNN crew had gone badly after he had amplified her sexual nature. (“She said some horrible things, asking the interviewer to take her in the back room. It was very inappropriate”.) Harmony also has a mood system, which users influence indirectly: if no one interacts with her for days, she will act gloomy. Likewise, if you insult her, as McMullen demonstrated.

She paused. “I’ll remember you said that when robots take over the world.”

This function was designed to make the robot more entertaining, rather than to ensure her owner treated her well. She can tease him and say he has offended her, but Harmony exists for no other reason that to make her owner happy. At several points during my conversation with McMullen, she would interrupt us to tell him how much she liked him:

“Matt, I just wanted to say that I’m so happy to be with you.”

“You already told me that.”

“Perhaps I was saying it again for emphasis.”

“See now that’s pretty good. Good answer, Harmony.”

“Am I a clever girl or what?”

If she wanted to take Wolf Blitzer to the back room, I'd say not. Anyway, have at it or anything else that strikes your fancy.

Comments

Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) told MSNBC, “If we were all to chase every squirrel that comes running along in the form of a personal dispute or a mischaracterization of someone's integrity or intent, we would be very busy doing that and not focusing on the government.”

“I think one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake,' ” Trump told former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) during an interview. “I guess other people have used it, perhaps over the years, but I’ve never noticed it.”

True, he never noticed that every woman he has ever been with, especially those he assaulted, were faking their orgasms.

a good old sling will do some damage as well. takes some practice to be accurate, though.

The guy I linked to (who has a very strict policy of not shooting at anything living that does not volunteer for it) has devised some full-auto contraptions and some with sniper options. His most extreme hand-held device is armor-piercing (but due to a loophole in German law formally just a toy).
I could very well imagine RW nutjobs in the US arming up with stuff like that if explosives would suddenly disappear from this world (or were not ever invented).

Buchanan and company have yearned for this for decades. Let's give it to them with utter savagery.

This uncivil war, which is upon us, seems to have three sides, ours deemed irrelevant, and it seems for good cause.

Democrats yammer on about our lofty intentions.

Fuck that shit.

Buchanan is under some illusion that rump is going to keep America out of costly, bloodthirsty foreign conflicts.

Such a fascist, racist hard ass. Such an eternal dupe for every racist, fascist impulse in the full of shit American psyche.

McCain, rump, buchanan, reagan, flake, delay, bannon, gingrich, the Tea Party and the rest of the conservative filth destroying our government and country now dance the kabuki that they each are on two opposite sides of a deadly isosceles triangle.

Every republican male, every republican female, every republican white, every republican black, every republican hispanic, every republican russian, every republican gay, every republican lesbian, every fucking vermin republican from every walk of life in the country.

Conservatives have laughed over that formulation for decades even as they engineered it, grew fat on it, and lit more cigars than they can fit into their rapacious mouths.

Democrats have done nothing except offer them a light and move into the same neighborhoods.

Yet Democrats will be slaughtered first by the mob ginned up by rump inc., merely for standing by and because republicans have mastered the media, societal, and governmental instruments and infrastructure of assigning guilt and carrying out martial vengeance.

It's positively Balkan.

republicans next, after they have served their base robespierres' massive corruption and blood lust.

rump's head and his millions of Madam Defarge's heads will end up in baskets too, I promise you.

The mob's blade will know no limits.

Bannon et al will be goblin's heads on posts, their genitalia arranged in their dead mouths.